A Different Kind of Beauty: Hair by Bob Recine

In the masterful hands of hairstylist Bob Recine, the essence of hair is reconstructed to reveal new ideas. A native New Yorker who is best known for his visual fabrications, Recine collaborated with photographer Mario Sorrenti to bring his latest study of form to our continuing series A Different Kind of Beauty.

This bright, neon-hued creation, part of his ongoing artistic exploration that also includes photography, mixed-media constructions, and other sculptures, is remarkably playful and undeniably phallic. Recine explains that the composition is a “combination of all kinds of debris and matter pertaining solely to hair.” Working with an amorphous ball of synthetic hair, Recine heated up the raw material and molded the figure in his lap until it took on its final form, the same process he uses for many of his other works. “It contains all the elements that I would imagine are myself,” he says. “I’m not so interested in the shape or form as I am the material and the concept of what that material can mean.”

This creation, UNTITLED 2017, comes from a series of sculptures and is a small portion of an open-ended meditation on body parts. Though the sculptures can easily provoke thoughts of eroticism, at the heart of the study is atomic construction. “I think it’s all a matter of a type of consciousness,” explains Recine, who says his creativity all comes from the same source, whether he is working with Lady Gaga, exhibiting alongside the artist Bjarne Melgaard, or joining forces with legendary photographers from Sorrenti to Helmut Newton. “When I collaborate with a photographer or a model, I don’t find any different obstacles or levels or scenarios that lead me to different places,” he says. “Even in the manipulation and the creation of the phallus, it’s the same thing I do with a model’s hair, trying to express something.”

Recine is an unabashed expressionist, whether he is defying hair with different products for a runway show or creating sculptures from it. Perpetually engulfed in the study of form and transformation, Recine explains, “I am much more interested in the atomic structure and the magical substance that portrays and imbues the mystery and power of the invisible entity called beauty.”